Google has released O3D, a browser plugin that gives developers a 3D API. It sits at a slightly higher level than other APIs (such as OpenGL / Canvas 3D type implementations) so it will be interesting to see if developers like the higher level abstraction, especially for building games. These APIs can also be implemented on top of the lower level APIs, so in theory it could sit on top of Canvas 3D.

Interestingly, it embeds V8 as the JavaScript engine which makes for a uniform engine, but unfortunately you can’t use your browser debugger (e.g. no Firebug).

It has also been carefully positioned “This API is shared at an early stage as part of a conversation with the broader developer community about establishing an open web standard for 3D graphics.”

It is interesting to see another new plugin from Google. I always hoped that Gears would be one developer plugin to rule them all but then we have the Earth API, and this (as well as the non developer ones like the defunct Lively).

Anyway, cool to see rich experiments in bringing 3D to Web developers, and I look forward to seeing what people do with it! Leisure Suit Larry 3D anyone? :)

I wouldn’t call the o3d plugin higher level, necessarily — while it provides a nice scene graph abstraction for performance reasons, you can have parameter-driven fragment and vertex shaders running full speed on the GPU and tweak every point and pixel procedurally if you need that.

You also can use your browser’s JS engine and selectively run computationally intensive code in V8.

3D or not, the most amazing stuff seems the capability to use V8 engine in other browsers, delegating to this extremely fast engine computations and/or other tasks.
If Google will create an Internet Explorer plugin able to switch on V8 engine in the DOM as well, we could finally start to develop web applications as we dreamed for ages!!!

Interesting to see another 32-bit-only plugin from Google when a lot of developers work on 64-bit systems (anyone with 4 GB of RAM here?). I wonder if that choice reflects a standard development system configuration inside Google or what?